It may surprise readers of the Guardian to know that Eric Hobsbawm and I were friends.

We were poles apart politically, of course. I still remember the disappointment I felt when I read his autobiography, Interesting Times, which I had hoped would contain some expression of remorse for his decision to remain a member of the Communist party even after the exposure of Stalin's crimes. Indeed, we disagreed about most contemporary political questions.

But his politics did not prevent Hobsbawm from being a truly great historian. I continue to believe that his great tetralogy – The Age of Revolution (1962), The Age of Industry (1975), The Age of Empire (1987) and The Age of Extremes (1994) – remains the best introduction to modern world history in the English language.

Unlike many continental intellectuals of the left, Hobsbawm the historian was never a slave to Marxist-Leninist doctrine. His best work was characterised by a remarkable breadth and depth of knowledge, elegant analytical clarity, empathy with the "little man" and a love of the telling detail. He and I shared the belief that it was economic change, above all, that shaped the modern era. The fact that he sided with the workers and peasants, while I side with the bourgeoisie, was no obstacle to friendship.

At a time when much smaller ideological differences are regularly the occasion for vituperative ad hominem attacks, Hobsbawm should serve as an example of how civilised people can differ about big questions while agreeing about much else. We shared not only a love of history. We also loved modern jazz (about which he wrote with great insight) and Welsh hills.

Above all, we liked to talk about the past. With his extraordinary erudition and quick wit, Hobsbawm was one of the greatest historical conversationalists I have ever known.

I hate the idea that we shall never again trade ideas and anecdotes about the past and the present. I hate even more the thought that his place as the grand old man of the British left may now be taken by one of his altogether less admirable – and amiable – epigoni.

Of all the British Marxist historians, Eric Hobsbawm is probably the most read today, and that is a mark of his extraordinary intellectual flexibility. His early work was typical of the history written by Marxists who came of age in the 1930s – in its emphasis on socio-economic forces, its interest in the big picture and its focus on ordinary people. But unlike some Marxists, he became increasingly aware of the importance of ideas and subjective experience. Captain Swing, his celebrated 1969 book (with George Rudé) on the English rural riots of the 1830s, combined structural social history with an attempt to understand the thinking and motives of individual protesters. Meanwhile, culture and ideas were the subject of one of his most influential books, The Invention of Tradition (1982, co-edited with Terence Ranger), which explored the manipulation of myth and ritual by political leaders and nationalist movements.

However, it is his great tetralogy on the world since 1789 – from The Age of Revolution to The Age of Extremes – that will stand as his real monument. In it he combined the virtues of the inter-war European Marxist intelligentsia – a cosmopolitan breadth and an awareness of deep structures – with a more British interest in historical narrative and elegant writing. At a time when academic historians were becoming increasingly suspicious of "grand narratives", he saw how important it was to understand the broader forces of historical change. And in doing so, he not only reframed the way historians look at the past, but also met a real appetite among the public for works of synthesis. The series is deservedly a classic, and will be read for many years to come.

Eric Hobsbawm was a brilliant historian. For one group of his readers, the generations of students who have used his works as textbooks, the clarity and dynamism of his writing were far more important than its ideological message. Many an essay crisis has been resolved with a pungent comment from his writings about nationalism or the long 19th century. But it was his ideological commitment, born from direct contact with fascism, that gave his history its savour. His voice was authoritative, and his command of detail, in the confusing world of 19th-century European politics, was like a liberation. You did not have to agree with the line, but at least you started with something solid to argue against.

The voices carping at his Marxist politics grew louder over time, and notably after the publication of his book on the 20th century, The Age of Extremes. "Ideologically speaking," one critic remarked, "Hobsbawm backed the losing side." Few people seem inclined to make the case for Soviet power today,

and fewer still call themselves Marxists. But my own generation of historians has struggled to find an alternative moral compass (we do not speak of ideology). Instead of liberation and justice, we find ourselves writing about memory; instead of class and capital, we identify victims and perpetrators. It is a way of dodging post-imperial guilt and continuing intellectual confusion. But threnodies are not an argument, and memories are definitely not facts (Hobsbawm's pithy condemnation of oral history, delivered at a conference where I was due to speak, was terrifying). Like the students who thumb through his books, we historians would do well to learn from this dazzling professional, though we need not read him for facts. Our lesson lies in his unflinching sense of engagement, his responsibility.

"The thing about Eric," a Birkbeck colleague once said to me, "is that he's interested in everything." The unique range of that omnivorous interest enabled him to move from the brilliant essays and articles that first made his name, gathered into collections with punchy titles (Labouring Men, Primitive Rebels, Bandits), to the long, synthesising volumes in the Age of … tetralogy which brought him a mass readership.

Most historians are by nature either short-story writers or novelists; Eric Hobsbawm was both. While his organising framework was Marxian (beginning as "an attempt to understand the arts", as he said himself), the subjects included mountain-climbing, opera, jazz and sartorial and eating fashions as well as work patterns, class solidarity and the movements of international finance – all delivered in a marvellously flexible and pungent style.

The cosmopolitan Olympianism was always tempered with an ironic undercurrent. I once heard him say that he thought his work would endure, not only because he believed his judgments were defensible, but also because he had gone to a good deal of trouble to teach himself to write well. This is true. But he had also absorbed (perhaps from his very early research, on the slightly surprising subject of the Fabians) Beatrice and Sidney Webb's injunction to apprentice sociologists: "Treasure your exceptions."

His own work recognised the importance of deviation, paradox and contingency, as well as the larger course of the historical juggernaut, and he was – indeed – curious about everything. His marvellous autobiography shows that his exceptional life conferred an instinctive understanding of the "interesting times" through which he lived; it also shows that he could never have been anything but a man of the left. But what matters is that his expansive intellect, linguistic range, cultural authority, organisational power and ability to see the interconnectedness as well as the variousness of the way people live through time, made him a great historian, in a great European tradition.